CertainKey To Pay $10,000 For MD5 Collision

jlcooke writes "CertainKey Inc. (the folks who put a $10,000 bounty on finding a collision in MD5) will award the prize Friday to Xuejia Lai, Xaioyun Wang, and Hongbo Yu of the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China. These are the same people who Broke SHA-1."

Gives a whole new meaning to...

[vasqzr]

HACKED BY CHINESE!

Now make them find the substitute!

[solafide]

That would benefit them. Now I think I will offer a prize of a few hundred thousand for another common crypto method and the condition is you have to find the substitute, plus everything you do is my property. Makes it quite profitable to offer the reward! Billy

Unfortunately...

[jd]

The serial numbers of the dollar bills used to pay the winners had a hashing collision in the bank machine, which therefore only registered the first note.

watch out!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't show up, guys! They're waiting to arrest you under the DMCA!

Re:watch out!

[jlcooke]

CertainKey Inc. is in Canada. And the funds are being wired to China.

Re:watch out!

[tomstdenis]

Does this mean no patties for a few weeks?

Tom

the reward is just like a bonus

[coolcold]

consider the amount of effort to break the algorithm when compared to the reward, it appears the reward won't be attractive enough for hackers to break it.

It would server great as a bonus in research though

Re:the reward is just like a bonus

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no crypto expert, but isn't it just a matter of finding a nondeterministic operation in the algorithm, giving it a resulting value, and proceeding backwards with two values that collide in that operation?

I think by "nondeterministic", you mean a relation which maps multiple inputs to a single output, don't you? The output of any hashing algorithm is deterministic: that is, you always get the same hash out when you put the same input string in. And I'll think you'll find when you look at the algorithm

Re:the reward is just like a bonus

[bedessen]

I'm no crypto expert...

You could have stopped right there, honestly...

Hashing functions are designed to explicitly prevent or make exceedingly difficult that sort of thing, so you can't just "work backwards" in that way. Maybe you'd like to review the algorithm... [wikipedia.org]

Does this mean...

[codehead]

...that these same guys found cost-effective means to crack not just one, but *two* widely-used hash algorithms?

what is safe now ?

[free2]

which algorithms are safe now ?

Re:what is safe now ?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Broken" SHA-1 is still safer (2^69 operations) than MD5 (2^64) was ever supposed to be.